Coupons provide benefits to manufacturers and consumers. For example, coupons are a beneficial way for manufacturers to test consumer interest in specific products, determine optimal pricing, and move out older inventory. Mail by the postal system, newspapers, and stores usually serve as outlets for providing coupons to consumers. Consumers benefit because coupons are universally accepted, follow GS1 (including Uniform Commercial Code) guidelines, are easily understood by consumers, and require no prior notification to a retailer. The coupons may be clipped out from the source document.
However, the process of validating, clearing and financial settlement associated with paper coupons can be a slow, labor intensive process potentially prone to fraud and misuse. An extraordinary number of paper coupons are printed, distributed and redeemed each year. Once a coupon is redeemed by the consumer, the paper coupon is monetized and it must flow through the current manual clearing and settlement process before the retailer is reimbursed for the value of the paper coupon and the cost of handling the paper coupon. This physical paper coupon clearing process can be slow and manual and sometimes requires a second independent count of each paper coupon before a retailer is reimbursed. Also, within the current paper clearing and settlement process there can be the issue of disputes and charge backs by the manufacture for the value of the redeemed paper coupon to the retailer for paper coupons which the retailer redeemed, but should not have because they were invalid in some way, whether it was because the paper coupon was a copied, or was redeemed after the expiration date on the paper coupon.
Accordingly, there is need for a real time, convenient way for validating and processing paper coupons quickly, eliminating potential fraud, and providing an auditable and comprehensive financial settlement process, which would eliminate the need for manually counting and validating each paper coupon redeemed.